


Five Times Natasha Throws Up On One Of Her Teammates

by Frances



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Avengers Tower, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Protective Avengers, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2017-12-13 12:20:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frances/pseuds/Frances
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And one time she doesn't. 5 + 1. Now complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clint

He asks her to confirm her location over the com. What he hears instead is her screaming and the precise noise (just how he learned this particular sound is another lifetime) of a terrified woman hurling herself at a solid wooden door. He knows all of this to be impossible: SHIELD has not yet produced the door that can keep Natasha out of where she wants to be, and things that don’t make her scream include bones that rupture flesh, scorpions, light to moderate torture, unexpected gunshot wounds and, well, everything. 

They are there for a flash drive. (It’s surely far more than that, but neither of them have the clearance to know whether this is someone’s death warrant or salvation). He should be covering her retreat through an alley, they should be leaving together, strolling together like newlyweds so as not to draw attention.

He doesn’t count or think as he does what he has to and moves in, she halts that terrible wailing only to draw breath, is easily found. He is not followed, for the moment, walks in with a wake of bodies behind him (Possibly a metaphor for his life but...He strangles the thought). 

“Back away from the door.” He tells her but she doesn’t and he blows the lock off anyway.

She stumbles (yes, her, with all her eerie dancer grace stumbling, yet another indicator of something altered, wrong) out of the closet, wide-eyed, trembling, eyes empty, knuckles, wrists and fingertips raw. By the end of a first step one of her ruined hands has formed a fist, by the genesis of the second she slams it into his ribs, abdomen, kidneys.

He grabs her wrists, tries not to hurt her, wishes she would reciprocate. If she’s decided to slay him eighteen months in there is really and truly no force that can prevent it. But if she were going to, it would be slick, unannounced, clever...If that’s coming, this isn’t it, not now. Which leaves...What, exactly?

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He bellows into her face, since their covers were blown a while ago and she is already doing her level best to pummel him.

She freezes, manages to recognize his face. Nat sways and looks down at her own hands. “My blood?”

He nods. She does the same, nearly collapses. Clint catches her as she doubles over and her mouth against his shoulder and then his shoulder is damp. Gross, but really and truly the least of it. “Did you get it?”

Shakes her swollen head gingerly and then she’s back. “I lost consciousness briefly in the process of being apprehended and restrained. The guard went for back up and will return momentarily. It’s in the middle drawer.”

Momentarily is not soon enough. They stroll away, the small flash drive gripped in his damp hand.

The plane ride home (if that is the word) is tense, short. She has said not one personal thing to him in half a year and now...He knows that she loses it when someone locks her in a closet. She will never say why, it doesn’t really matter, could have been a hundred things. Maybe that was Draykov’s version of time out, maybe she nearly suffocated in one; probably a closet was the sight of whatever happens to make you a killer at age 10 and still leaves you with nightmares 18 years later. As if things weren’t already uneven between them, “debt” easily being one of the fifty words she uses most frequently, then she also broke some of his ribs and threw up on him. She stares him down, to all appearances trying to make him forget what he knows about her through sheer force of willpower, trying to foresee how he will employ this to destroy her.

Her mind is a thing that can just barely fathom another possibility, that he will do her no harm, ever, with this or anything else. 

He roots around in his satchel, she tenses.

“Gum?” 

She stares at it, seriously if momentarily considering the possibility that it’s poisoned. He sighs, breaks it in half, and puts one in his own mouth and bites down. Then and only then does she take the other and chew.

Fury reads the report and for a second the cousin of pity in his eyes (back then it was indeed eyes). She is not the first, twentieth, or last SHIELD agent to have a trigger. The next moment it’s gone and he orders desensitization to commence the next morning. Only when she has control again will she be allowed on any more missions. It’s Clint that winces, Natasha nods serenely and goes briskly in search of a shower.

It is later that same night and she is pacing in the hallway. She must know this is his room, must know that a single one of her footsteps is enough to awaken him.

He finally opens a door in front of her for the second time in twelve hours. “Nat? Come on in.” Clint ensures that his tone makes that directive optional. Giving her orders, even casual domestic ones, yields results that are extreme. Though that too is fading, the longer that she’s with them. He never thought that he would learn to view SHIELD as the softer option.

She does come in. She sits on the very edge of the bed and he flops back down on the rest of it. They sit in silence because neither of them know how to start this or indeed most conversations. 

“I’ll wash your shirt.”

“What?” It’s also 3 am. If she was going to be something short of baffling to him, it would be after a cup or eight of coffee.

“The one that I...I’ll wash it.” There is the same something that made him spare her in her face right now and he lightly touches her shoulder. She allows it for a second before shifting away, but one second is not zero seconds and he is really not accustomed to being the most normal one in the room.

“It’s already clean.”

“Oh.” 

Much later and after years of study he will decide that saying “I’ll wash your shirt” was her way of communicating the following: gratitude for her retrieval, for his failure to ask one personal question, for the piece of gum that was just a piece of gum. Finally, that she is trying very hard to maintain some kind of balance with him that doesn’t involve friendship and it isn’t working.

“I’ll tape up your ribs for you.”

“A professional beat you to it.” He lifts up his shirt to show her, she scowls, either at her failure to personally fix it or the implication that she is not a professional in all she deigns to do.

“Then I’ll do something else instead.”

“Well, you stabbed someone who was trying to shoot me last week. Let’s both call that something else.”

The silence between them stretches and then wanes. “I’m starting desensitization tomorrow.”

“I heard.” He will spend the whole day convincing himself that he can’t hear her screaming.

“Today...that won’t happen again.”

“How are your hands?” This line of questioning is growing more familiar to her. She shows him the bandages.

“Perfect.” He thinks uncharitably that by her standards any hands that still have bones in them are perfect.

“Right. Sleep well, Nat.”

“...Good night.” 

With those words but without her exit, he burrows back under those blankets and to all appearances goes to sleep, because trust has to start somewhere.

Natasha weighs his recklessness for the hours she sits there waiting for an unpleasant morning and finds a number of disturbing convictions within herself. She cannot rationally consider whether or not to murder him. She tries, tries to decide whether her old friend strangling or new love shooting would be best, how she would hide the body, how she would flee....But the images of him still, frozen, bleeding...All unacceptable. 

She would die before killing him. That new knowledge that shines like a razor blade has her spewing Russian curses into the unresponsive dark.


	2. Tony

Nat spoons the batter onto the hot griddle and doesn’t flinch when it sputters and pops. She peers more closely as the blueberries grow shiny from the heat. It smells good. It’s also unhealthy and therefore the kind of breakfast that slows you down to the mortal benefit of one of the scores of people who want you to bleed out on the floor, but still good.

“Should I flip this now?”

“Why not?” Tony has spent this entire morning audibly enjoying teaching her something. And drinking two pots of coffee. The combination has not been winning. 

He bounces up and down on his heels in excitement. He winks and adds something about how it’s nice to see her frying something that isn’t someone’s metaphorical genatalia. 

With a controlled and conserved motion she attempts just that, losing half of it to the stovetop. Stark notices the smoke and his chuckle is grating, but his clear inability to figure out why half of his face is numb is satisfying enough to make up for it. She wonders again just why she is here and then remembers. Oddly enough, she likes them. No reason to make it complicated, but there is probably nothing that could make her say those words out loud.

Thirty minutes pass and a pile of pancakes--some charred, many undercooked, all suspiciously lumpy, towers on a thick plate. The rest of them stagger into the kitchen, with the exceptions of Steve and Thor who stroll in, humming and smiling respectively as though this is a godly or even tolerable hour.

“Pancakes! Jarvis, immortalize this moment, please.” Tony crows and places a bottle of syrup on the table with a flourish. His smile is enormous and oddly genuine.

Clint speaks first, eyeing the stack with an eyebrow raised. “They smell fine but-” Natasha slams one onto his plate so forcefully that the blackened top cracks open, releasing a tiny river of batter. He shrugs and coats it in a shiny layer of maple syrup and then downs the whole thing in a single bite. He has always eaten like that, always will. Natasha and Bruce, both of whom have seen X-rays of his spine know: He would have been taller but for ferocious years of malnutrition in his adolescence. 

Stark does the same, drowning his in syrup before gnawing on it. Steve thanks her genuinely for making breakfast and manages to keep most of the struggle off of his face as he chews; Bruce rips into them indifferently, lost in thought. Thor declares them “gamey” with a huge smile and eats with apparent relish.

Nodding, she takes one of raw ones for herself, dips it into syrup from Clint’s plate and consumes it delicately. Clint is on his third and his expression stills and then grows strained. Sweat is beading on his forehead. Are they that bad? Stark is swaying, and her own gut gives a twist. 

Wait. She recognizes that feeling, that particular pain, that aftertaste. Her world tips sideways. No. No.

Apparently she said that out loud. There is a potent pause in the conversation. “Spit them out.” An array of confused faces...They don’t understand but they don’t need to. “I said spit them out.” Her hiss is more effective than a scream and they oblige, reaching for napkins or, in Thor’s case, simply aiming for the floor. 

Clint slides to the floor and she kneels next to him, agony in her torso, but she’s had decades of practice ignoring that. Stark is groaning, eyes wide, fear verging quickly into terror. “Captain,” She says, “My room. Gray bag, top of the closet.” She forces Clint to lie on his side.

Thor eases Stark to the floor, Bruce crouches with them. “What was in it?” He asks, voice soft.

“Arsenic,” She murmurs and Banner winces, “But I have...” That sentence is hard to finish. Clint’s eyes are sliding in and out of focus and Stark’s body is contorting in a way that suggests he no longer has the final say in what it does and does not do.

Steve returns, presses the bag which rattles with the sound of many pills into her arms. “I don’t know which one.”

She finds the blue bottle. Thor allows her to struggle with the lid for all of a moment before he breaks it neatly in half with his thumb. She bends over Clint, because the day his life is not the one she saves with her own hands will never come. 

“Two for Stark,” she says and Bruce nods. She pries Clint’s mouth open, calculates quickly and forces a handfull of the pills down his throat with her fingers because even swallowing is beyond him now. 

There is the sound of a struggle as Tony can’t hold still despite the many arms pinning him down and the pills are spilling down his shirt and... With a growl she drags her body over and straddles him. In a single practiced motion (Bruce carefully does not ponder the origin of that skill) she saves his life. Then she throws up all over his arc reactor. Right. Her own body, violently opposing the metal trying to conquer it. She gropes around and someone asks, “One pill?” and she nods. They help her get it down. 

She’s back on her feet within hours. The other two are not even conscious. 

They all take turns pacing around the sterile beeping room, staring down at their pale and intubated comrades. She and Pepper never leave. Natasha offers words of threat and adoration, off-key lullabies in Russian. Pepper cries sometimes, strokes Tony’s forehead constantly, wishes this weren’t so damn familiar. She takes a break only to hug Natasha and thank her for his life, leaving the other redhead somewhere between baffled and moved. 

Nick Fury has already found why, what, how because he’s really good at that. The answers: A man’s daughter died during the New York fiasco, he put arsenic in the pancake syrup, didn’t care that he poisoned fourteen others collaterally that same day.

They both wake up a bit the next day, as a group they pretend that this isn’t what they’ve been waiting 26 hours for. Neither are permitted to get out of bed.

Natasha leaves for a while around 2 am, whispers when she gets back in order to not wake up Pepper, who sleeps curled around the thing that makes her life simultaneously complicated and worth living.

She nudges his shoulder and he blinks sleepily up at her. She carefully pours syrup over the pancake, cuts him a small bite. “Eat this.”

“Nat? What?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions. Right now or you won’t be able to eat these ever again.”

“Is that really important?” 

“Yes.” Truthfully? Probably not, but she knows better than to ponder these bloodless impulses.

“Depends. Did you make it?” His face manages a grin.

“No.” She smiles back, for a moment proud of possessing a persona so intimidating that acquiring fresh pancakes a full five hours after the cafeteria closed didn’t even require a verbal threat.

“Then sure.” He chews and swallows and she doesn’t mention how long she spent testing them for every conceivable poison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all. Sorry about the delay. Please leave a comment if you've got a minute, it would make my day. Also, I am trying to come up with a title for another piece I'm writing so if you have any inspired method for doing this please share.


	3. Bruce

Natasha immediately regrets taking a breath  and comes to a painful, blurry, and hot awareness. She opens her eyes only very slightly, a lesson learned from the agonies of tear gas and salt water, but this isn’t that it’s smoke. The regular kind. This discovery relaxes her, what she knows about surviving fire, metaphorical and otherwise, could fill a book or at least a short pamphlet. First, stay low, a wet cloth over the face, second escape. Except...The others. Where are they?

Her senses finally inform her of the following: She is naked, chained to something that her strength cannot move, waking up from a hefty dose of sedatives, unharmed, and in nearly perfect darkness that is conclusively not in her room. This is not a combination featured in her ideal day.

In an incomplete staccato burst she rememberes. Barton is in Dubai, she was supposed to join him when his mark proved to be much less homosexual than SHIELD intel had suggested. It would be her usual jam, deliberate capture, getting punched in the face a few times for the greater good. Stark had done something to Banner’s bed? Irrelevant. 

More importantly, Nat would have prepared for Dubai, so without further direction her brain forms a plan.She crams a finger down her own throat, careful to stay low where the air won’t burn her from the inside and throws up a tiny arched piece of metal, bile-covered salvation. 

Someone male murmurs, “Seriously?” from the neighborhood of her knee and she realizes that she has conducted this operation above and as a result onto Banner. He is not her fire-survival partner of choice, not when he could lose it and cause a collapse, alongside the daily assumption that he will not rend her body asunder himself. Maybe not him, but her persistent nightmares have failed to make that distinction.

“Banner, are you going to be able to keep control here?” 

“Maybe. Where are we?” She hears him trying to rise and shoves him down hard, hears the clink of his chains. Whatever else is wrong with him he did not waste time with questions like, “Is that you, Natasha?” or “What happened?” This is something she will take time to  appreciate when and if they live. 

“Stay low. Burning building is all we know right now.” 

She picks her locks first:  if he goes and she’s still tied to the wall her odds of survival dip from low to nonexistent, if this whole burning building collapses on them in the next three seconds, he’ll shift and be absolutely fine. Realistically, her life is the only one in danger. It takes her almost a full ten minutes to remove all the locks from her own body because picking locks is actually kind of difficult. In that time the heat and smoke have grown denser still, bordering on unbearable, which is an adjective she has largely discarded. Nat moves on to Banner, gropes around and his skin is shifting, writhing and boiling and she crouches to flee, but then he whimpers in a human voice instead of roaring in an animal’s.

She locates his wrists and begins her work. He’s shaking from causes unknown and smells foul. “Banner, why can’t you change?”

“These chains. The other guy can’t bust through them and it hurts to try.”

“Adamantium,” she swears to herself. Whoever it was, he or she wanted the bonds to be unbreakable even in the event that one of the powerhouse Avengers found them in time. She recalculates. Both of them will likely die of smoke inhalation before she gets him free, but she just hunkers down farther, keeps twisting the metal into the keyhole anyway and holds her breath as often as she dares. 

“Do I even want to know where that lock pick came from?” He murmurs  but she is intimately familiar with a tendency to use humor to deflect reasonable mortal terror and does not bother to respond.

She works one, two locks off. “You can leave,” He offers in a soft pained voice,  “When it’s life or death, the other guy always comes through.” 

“You mean until now.” 

Nat moves down to his ankles. For some reason, the hair on them is hysterically funny and she chuckles, and her calculated twists of the pick grow sloppy. “How much smoke have you inhaled?” He tries to ask her but he can’t stop coughing long enough and it’s a pretty stupid question anyway.

The last one...Her fingers are contorting and she can’t remember why this is important but her hands still know what to do. He’s free and then enormous and bellowing, swatting at walls like they’re cobwebs.

He gathers her and she shakes at the touch, waiting for blinding bone-pain but within seconds and a few explosive crashes they’re in a huge parking lot and the breaths she takes increase her clarity rather than stealing it. As a result, she remembers her terror even better. She looks into his eyes and quivers like a leaf, but instead of the expected deadly beating she receives the most awkward and monosyllabic thank-you-for-my-life, immediately followed by the return of Bruce, who is just as naked and soot-covered as she is. 

They both sit and watch the innocuous-looking warehouse, now minus three walls, burn. She remembers more: Stark and an explosion that made Banner’s room--right next to the lab--uninhabitable. He’d slept in Clint’s room instead, since Clint was abroad and generally didn’t use a bed anyway.

That’s important, that explains something.

“Um,” He coughs some more for good measure. “Thank you. For not leaving me to die in a warehouse fire. That was...nice of you.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

In the end Natasha has to mug a night watchmen just to get a cell phone to call the others, probably the most embarrassing chapter of the whole fiasco.

They arrive full of a wild-eyed relief she doesn’t know what to do with. They’d all been out searching for hours, painfully aware of the odds of finding someone who’d been stolen. Tony compliments her attire and tells them that if they wanted some time alone they only needed to ask. Thor wraps his cape around her, which is sweet, she supposes distantly but mostly unnecessary. 

On the way back Captain says, “I should have known it would be fine. After all, he was with you.” and Nat realizes with no small amount of shock that he’s talking to her.

 

This is her least favorite part of being on a team. Every time she’s in mortal danger she not only has to survive and fill out the SHIELD report but then has to Talk About It with four genuinely concerned but generally clueless individuals and Clint, who will forever have his own category. They all claim that they have the right to know who’s out for her blood this week for the safety and sanity of everyone involved. Fury orders her to tell them, knowing that the team only functions (barely) as it is and one or two biting secrets will launch them back to the days when they spent more time attacking each other than anyone else.

Clint made it back from Dubai whole despite terrified worry when Natasha didn’t show up and the inferior female back-up he had to rely on as a result, so it’s a complete team that sits together in the living room. Stark plays the security footage hijacked from a camera outside of that warehouse and then freezes it at the sight of a tan man whose features are for some reason impossible to describe. He is pushing a wheelbarrow with--is that her calf and Banner’s arm dangling over the side? Eerie. 

“Anyone we know, Natasha?” 

He zooms in on the mans face, half of which is absent.

“Yes. His face....I did that.” Clint slides closer so that their knees and hips are touching silently in the only show of support he dares. 

Rogers lets out a low whistle, everyone else stares quietly, different sets of calculations spinning behind distinct eyes. Banner finally asks the obvious. “Any particular reason?”

She knew that sooner or later these words would have to come out of her mouth and apparently soon is now and, if she’s honest  (she generally isn’t) she doesn’t want any of them to look at her differently, with disdain instead of whatever this thing that binds them together is, she dreads hearing  them wonder aloud if she’s any better than the creatures they hunt and knowing that they are right. Clint puts his hand on her knee because these next few minutes are going to go against every instinct she has and she’s looked less worried while losing teeth and her knee is not unpleasant to touch. He kills that thought with the ease of ancient practice. He makes eye contact with them one after the other, trying to beg silently for the restraint of careless words.

“Sao Paolo. My target was getting heart surgery in the hospital that day and his death was supposed to look accidental. So I incapacitated him and set a fire.” She keeps her eyes trained on a single spot on the wall.

Stark’s eyebrows are near his hairline. “So he was the target?”

“No, the target died as planned,” No point in doing this halfway, “along with thirteen others who were too injured to flee and two nurses that tried to save them. He” she pauses and gestures at the security footage,  “was the target’s bodyguard and brother.”

Well, damn. 

She doesn’t fill that silence by saying that it was just her body that set that fire because the woman within it was so different, that she is defined by trying to pay for those actions, that some small naive part of her that she’s tried over and over again to crush hopes that that might matter. Some things are beyond justification. 

Banner speaks. “SHIELD still hired you with that kind of resume?”

“Not exactly. Clint did. He was supposed to kill me instead, so the higher-ups weren’t happy.”

Banner again. “And you’re...okay with that? That he was supposed to kill you?”

She shrugs. “What does it matter?. He didn’t.”

“When were we supposed to hear that story?” Stark adds. 

Neither her nor Clint speak the obvious answer aloud: Ideally, never. 

Nat manages to look at Banner when she continues. “That’s why he took you too. He’d never actually seen me or Clint but he must have known which rooms are ours...” A moment for the shock of someone knowing not only how to bypass Tony’s frankly dangerous security system but aware of who slept where, information which is written nowhere, to bounce around the room. “He did know that Clint gave me that chance. That was enough to want him burned too.” 

They are, for nearly a minute, out of words and she is on the verge of sidling away and deciding whether or not to disappear. 

Thor stands up, because he’s someone who doesn’t care how melodramatic his actions are, just how honest, and it would probably take even Tony ten minutes to even define “corny” in a way that he could understand. His voice booms. “Yesteryear, I sought to commence a war that would have slain thousands to satisfy my own petty pride. Were it not for the actions of Loki, I surely would have succeeded. It is through his cunning and no goodness of mine that my hands lack that blood.”

Bruce, conversely, murmurs in a broken tone. “I don’t actually know how many people the other guy--we--have killed. Most of those incidents were classified.”

Clint adds. “You all know that I kill people for a living. Part-time these days, but lately it’s been...adding up.” There it is, out in the open, the reason the two of them share for coming here, with these misfits, attempting these impossible things.

Even Stark joins. “Romanoff, you probably know exactly how many skeletons my fortune was built on. I understand wanting redemption and you have as much right as I do to try and find it.” 

Captain. “People can change and that’s what you did. I think we’re done talking about this.” 

And they are. If they were other people, maybe they would hug it out, maybe she would cry. But they aren’t and she doesn’t, though in honor of the weight of the occasion Steve is allowed to select the movie (Meet Me in St. Louis) and Tony the food (Anchovy Pizza, but she wouldn't recognize her life it it were perfect).She breathes easy and it feels good.


	4. Thor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very kindly to those that reviewed this or But Not Worth Writing Down. That kind of thing just makes my life. Please feel free to respond, especially with criticism; I'm in this game to try to get better.

She limps into the New York SHIELD base. She has arrived from Bulgaria, throat sore, body febrile, and skin covered with dirt, soot, and the blood of three different species. Fury’s voice directs her to the infirmary. If she were the sort of person who secretly finds Hallmark Cards moving she might say that when she sees the looks on their faces and that two of them are gone, her heart slides down against her spine. But she has been in situations where that was physically possible so this chewing worry in her stomach is minor in comparison. Or it should be. 

“Are they alive?” Her voice is hoarse and smoky, so she clears her throat and mentally chastises herself for the question; SHIELD doesn’t provide medical care to corpses.

“Steve is fine,” says Banner, “but Clint...”

Thor, whose voice can be typically heard from neighboring counties, whispers, “Is not well.”

“Coma?”

“No.”  A plethora of other possibilities crowd into her brain. Blind? Limbless? Forgetful?

Nat barges through the door they’re crowding around and into the sterile room. She’s spent months rooms just like this; has tallied the ceiling tiles and forced meaning into the beeps. Steve sits in a chair next to the bed, flipping through Good Housekeeping absently. He stands the moment she enters the room, a habit he never managed to shake. “There’s only supposed to be one of us in here at a time, so I'll just...I’m so sorry, Natasha.” He claps her shoulder and leaves.

Clint sits on the edge of the bed, not bent or bloody, but everything, just everything is off and her instincts are screaming. Clint looks up at and then straight through her. She mutters his name and neither that sound nor her face trigger any change, any response at all.

Her stomach churns and she flees back into the hallway where the rest sit stony-eyed and perhaps a dozen braver agents have arrived to mill around, chatter, and gawk at the plummet of a legend. Thor rises and walks over to her, places an enormous hand on her back and says something awkward that is meant to be comforting.. Her body is bending down without her permission and....

The Black Widow, sick with worry and also the flu, throws up on Thor’s shoes. Twice.

The room goes silent and then cold. The agents, all of whom have been trained in the finer deductive arts, crane their necks because, clearly, that did not just happen. Thor requests that they “Begone” and when some hesitate a lone blue spark dances across the hammer and the sound of rapid footsteps immediately follow.

None of them bother to ask Natasha if she’s okay now, having done so under every conceivable circumstance and never receiving an answer except an affirmative or a bloody gurgle. Instead Steve asks her if she wants a drink, a much less inflammatory inquiry. She says no and takes a deep but silent breath. She then strolls back into Clint’s hospital room, sits determined to wait him out. (It is the long-suffering Banner who ultimately cleans up the hall). Clint is indifferent to her loud exit, re-entrance, and hunched shoulders.

What’s different about this time, this wound, this wait? Nothing. This isn’t the closest she’s come to losing him. This isn’t anything, except maybe one time too many.  She can’t calm down, can’t breath deep, can’t wrestle her worry down, can’t make her mind stop thinking. She doesn’t even care that she’s just destroyed an image it took a decade of intimidation tactics to perfect. Whatever place Natasha has been shoving feelings into for a lifetime is tight and full. She is forever making promises to bearded saints she doesn’t even believe in whenever he’s hurt and she hasn’t kept any of them. She’s wondering how many more incidents can leave them dying, how often you can touch death before it touches you back.

All of this culminates in a conviction that to hell with shield and personal space both, he’ll be lucky if she even lets him go to the bathroom by himself. If (when) Clint is dies violently it’s going to be because they killed her first, not because she was on the other side of the world, telling someone else's lies. 

She doesn’t think like this, she tries to remind herself, she disdains people who do. She doesn’t and she can’t, but the thoughts keep spinning anyway and she’s wondering if SHIELD will let her live if she goes. 

Stark drifts into the room and interrupts the grim maze her mind has been wandering in. “There’s only supposed to be one visitor at a time, but since we regularly break the laws of physics I suppose Shield regulations are actually a step down for us.”

She grunts. He is here to check on her and that isn’t irritating even though it really should be. 

“This whole,” his hands flutter at the indifferent archer, “Thing isn’t psychological. Apparently it’s some new drug and Banner crushed the only guy that actually knows what it does during the rescue. So he could start tap dancing or, well, go on a murderous rampage. Dunno.”

Natasha winces. If (when, she tells herself in the face of all evidence and wonders where that faith came from) he snaps out of it this will doubtless evoke memories of the last mind control fiasco. She tried to help him pick up the pieces after that, but it was more like sweeping up the dust. He got better, though, because that’s what he does. She takes a moment to pray (yes, pray) for a continuation of that trend. “Why isn’t he restrained, then?”

Stark shrugs, “We said no. Then we said we’d keep watch in case he goes off the glowy blue deep end again.” Knowing Stark, probably those words verbatim.

She approves, which is not like her, but she isn’t like herself. “He’ll be fine.”

Stark’s eyebrows go up. “Tolstoy, I would say catatonia falls squarely under the great and enormous umbrella of not fine.  I bet he wouldn’t even look up if you took your shirt off, though maybe we should try that just to make sure?”

Nat is too upset to rise to that bait and only barely stops herself from literally hurting him. Something in her visage suggests this enough for Tony to sigh dramatically and “leave her to it.” He fills a vial with Barton’s blood first; even pain evokes nothing. 

On the third day, they transfer him into the tower and Natasha has a fever of 103. Clint takes no apparent notice, is just as content to stare at this much more expensive wall. Pepper plies her with crackers and soda around the clock; Natasha can eat only when she doesn’t really think about it. Thor or Steve is always in that room with her, probably out of fear that she couldn’t take him down in her current state with a side of misplaced chivalry. Banner and Stark are largely absent, busy giving rats the compound they pulled out of his blood, trying to transmute data into a miracle.

It’s on day four that they discover something important. “Clint, you want something to eat?” has no effect. “Clint, eat this,” however, yields instantaneously the desired results. He follows orders and nothing else. Knowing what he would want and in defiance of Steve’s wince and unhappy glances, Natasha follows him throughout the day, ordering him to eat, sleep, exercise and practice his aim at regular intervals. 

“Captain, we have to work to keep up or die that much sooner.” There’s really nothing he can say to that ragged truth. 

However, the sight of him jogging listlessly and knowing he would continue until dead if not told to do otherwise puts a heavy strain on the team psyche. They are even warier of leaving him alone, he obeys every voice in any language; he would be less vulnerable completely paralyzed. At Natasha’s bloodshot insistence SHIELD remains ignorant of this development. Another result is that Bruce and Tony task themselves with a second miracle: a vaccine as well as a cure. 

On day five, Stark strolls in again. He compares her current state to that of a dog with wheels for legs, unfavorably, and asks her to “Go take a nap already.”. She tells him to go screw himself, in Russian, but the message gets across. 

On day seven Natasha’s white blood cell count is approximately normal again and she still hasn’t gotten around to showering. She sits slumped in the corner of the gym while Barton lifts weights, counting carefully and waiting to check for signs of swelling or strain. Thor strolls into the gym and frowns at her. She waits for a booming and probably socially awkward declaration. He is silent until he isn’t, nearly a minute in total and a minute longer than expected.

“I am desirous of your company this afternoon, if you could spare it.”

She doesn’t even look up. “I’m busy.”

“Please, Lady Widow, you and the sun have too long been parted. Our battle commander has requested the duty of guarding the archer and Jane Foster has graciously informed me that I ought ‘to get out more’. I beg your aid in honoring this request.”

This is just too much, too ridiculous, almost sad. She looks between Barton who apparently feels precisely the same way about her presence and, say, paint chips and Thor who glows offensively with health and the desire to spread goodwill to man. “Fine,” She mutters.

“This is most excellent news! I will inform our commander.” Suddenly, he freezes and looks at her as though she’s  brandishing a broadsword. “I understand that when two comrades seek sustenance alone it is often considered a ‘date’, which is an event...”

Somehow, the disbelief on her face says everything. “Most wonderful! You are already aware of the caveat that states this need not always be so. Tell me, do you share my fondness for the ice cream?”

“Sure.”

They go to the mall, an event sure to spawn dozens of YouTube videos. He proudly purchases two ice cream dishes, complete with oreo crumbs and fluoresecent worms. Prior to sliding her dish across the table, he methodically fortifies it with the gummy worms from his.

“You don’t like those?” She asks.

“Nay, they are what I savor most but your path of late has been treacherous indeed.” He grins down at her as they eat and talks about Jane, his family (minus one), his other friends, his horses.

She wonders just how he manages this almost mindless glee. He’s fond of Barton and, despite daily evidence, no fool... Natasha understands, he considers Clint’s recovery an absolute fact, a certainty. His faith is complete and unbreakable and for a moment she is so very jealous because hers is pneumatic fawn . She showers when they get home but sleep is a lot harder. 

On day eight, every last one of lab rats dies and the scientists sigh and go back to square one. They remove some more of Clint’s blood while Natasha prowls in the background.

“There’s less of it in his blood now. A lot less...It’s too soon to say for sure, but he might come out of it by himself. Maybe even in a week or two.” Banner whispers, as though those words would have any more effect if he’d bellowed them. Pity on Stark’s face is a nearly comical juxtaposition. She is unraveling and, awkwardly enough, they notice. 

Natasha thanks them and takes the night shift watching Barton.

On day nine, she starts talking to him. She knows that she may as well be addressing a cement block, but the constant silence is growing unwieldy. She sings him Russian sea shanties, goes over irregular Finnish verbs, blurts out half-baked knock-knock jokes she just made up. At the end of the day she’s out of nonsense and, once certain that they are completely alone, asks him, politely, to please come back.

His stare remains empty. . 

On Day ten, showing a genuine lack of appreciation for dramatic timing and the predictions of certified geniuses, he wakes up in the minute hours of the morning baffled and knowing he is not alone. He immediately gropes for a weapon and then sees, actually looks at Natasha. She is propped against his wall and, of course, awake watching him, apparently having evolved beyond a need to blink. “That’s kind of creepy, Nat..”

He grows concerned as she methodically shakes her head to clear away what is obviously a hallucination. And then more so as she barks, “Start jogging,” and then stares expectantly. 

“No thanks...”

That silence stretches until the ancient exhaustion on her face is of more interest to him than her nonsensical conversation. He knows better than to inquire about the causes directly. “Couldn’t sleep? C’mere.” He pats the bed next to him and she rises and sits down, hard. Her weight tilts him and he halts the thought before his stupid brain can assign any symbolism. 

He waits patiently for her words or lack thereof, knowing it’s everytime been worth it. “It’s been a bad week,” she manages. “Do you remember any of it?”

Clint considers that briefly, and then every fluid ounce of blood drains from his face. He only mostly manages to hide his shudder. “Did I-”

She interrupts. “You didn’t hurt anyone. Or even anything.”

He pauses, checks this against memories that are strange for being completely untinged by a personality, finds her words accurate. His hands are quivering. “Yeah? Not so bad then, in the grand scheme of mind control.”

“Whatever, Barton.” She leans her head into his shoulder. 

“Your jokes really sucked.”

She shrugs and forces her stubborn face to curve into a small smile. “Good thing I have so many other talents.”

He does the same. “Thanks for not letting Stark give me any orders.” Truth: She would have cut his tongue out if he’d tried. Some things aren’t funny. 

“I should let the others know you’re up.”

“Get some sleep first, Nat. It’s late.”

She lays down where she is and curls into his blankets, not caring that that isn’t exactly what he meant. She tries to tell herself that it’s all fine now, that the worry that has lived and thrived in her stomach can go. But it won’t and doesn’t and instead she finds herself wondering just how bad it’ll get next time. She used to be so good at levelling out and now...Something has been growing in her, tumor-like, insidious; ignoring it isn’t helping. 

Maybe it started when she spilled her bloody guts to that band of freaks and not one of them flinched, maybe in New York and her last-ditch effort to rise beyond murderess, maybe longer, since she encountered Clint and simultaneously a dream of relative normalcy. She knows it is a weakness that will ultimately culminate in her demise; Steve might call it humanity. Briefly, she considers killing Barton to halt this evolution, but instead scoots over so he has enough room to lie down too. She asks herself again. What’s different about this time? Now, in the darkness of the room and the softness of the bed, the answer is so obvious: she is. 

He shifts to lie down, hesitates, and then runs a hand through her hair.She doesn’t flinch away, instead allows her awareness to drift towards sleep even though in this position he could shatter her neck before she could shatter his.  He could, but he won’t and for a second she hates the wariness within her that demands that constant assurance.


	5. Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's one more after this, but I just can't seem to get it right.

“You’re all I have too, y’know.”  
-Pepper to Tony, Ironman

Natasha walks into in the kitchen to wait for Pepper, but it is not empty. Steve has already arrived for the apparent purpose of spending his evening staring morosely into the freezer. Nat comes up behind him, taking a moment to shove away the disbelief of an existence that does not constantly include listening for footsteps. She notices that he holds an empty water glass carefully and looks about one bad haircut away from genuine tears. A year ago she would have wraithed away but Steve had gotten clipped by a semi the other day saving a Rottweilier and his misery is palpable. 

“Need some help, Cap?” He whirls around and his hands curl into fists. She vaults over the island counter and draws her gun. The glass shatters on the floor.

The sight of a beautiful woman calmly aiming a gun at his person renders him nostalgic, weak-kneed and grieving, proof that all fundamental goodness aside he would not per se place last in the team Messed Up Individual contest. 

“Sorry. No.” He sputters and then stands down. She eyes him for a moment too long, then disarms and gathers the larger pieces. He bends down with her and simply sweeps them into his hands like they were spilled marbles, heedless of the dozens of bloody pinpricks on his palms. He shakes glass shards out of his palms like they’re dried mud. 

She gets a glass of cold water for him, careful to step to the side in such a way that he can see that there is a button on the outside of the freezer for this specific purpose. 

“Stark ran out of popsicles.” The day that she’ll call him on that lie is not this one. 

Pepper strolls into the room and puts on lipstick simultaneously, her life lately being something that doesn’t allow for tasks not performed in tandem. “Are you ready Natasha?” She still stumbles over that name

She sees Natasha lurking near the counter and Captain America leaving a bloody handprint on it. Pepper makes eye contact with the other woman and makes a decision. “Steve, Natasha and I were going to go out for coffee. Won’t you please join us?”

“If you’re sure that I won’t be intruding...” There’s wariness with an edge of gratitude to his words. When was the last time he actually left this hideous tower? 

“Of course not,” Pepper waves away the very thought with one hand while the other straightens her bangs. 

He pats down his pockets, making sure his cell phone and wallet are there. Natasha groans in anticipation of the moment that he will try to pay for all of them.

Pepper drives and her amiable chatter covers for the other two in the car. Were this a cover job, Natasha would speak perhaps two true sentences and both of them would relate to her shoe size. Interactions these days taste different, lying feels exhausting, but honesty severely limits conversations. Clearly, stories from work are out ( Just last week I murdered a child molester with a toothpick and you would not believe the stains!) and her family and friends...Silence is preferable. Steve is slowly learning to see them beyond something female and therefore arcane, but isn’t prone to chatter in any case. 

Steve pulls out chairs for both of them and his second-ever genuine smile (at Natasha’s last count) appears when Pepper grins, openly charmed at an act that often receives baffled and ungrateful looks. He, of course, after dutifully memorizing their preferences, volunteers to fetch the coffee and pastries while they sit. 

“Natasha,” Pepper opens, her words a forced casual that anyone else would have believed, and the other woman remembers why she has been evading this particular outing for months. “How have you been?”

The truth: Baffled, guilty, weak with a side of seriously considering moving to Panama and living in the jungle where her only real worry would be large, carnivorous reptiles. She spends the majority of her highly limited free time alternating between shadowing and avoiding Clint. The remainder is spent training until her joints literally give to keep herself from introspection and, of course, to live longer and murder more efficiently. 

“Just lovely,” she answers cheerfully, sliding into Natalie because Natasha was being creepily silent. “I understand your work has been picking up lately?”

Pepper ignores this invitation to complain, which has seldom failed Natasha in social situations. “I’m getting the sense that you’re going through something right now and talking helps normal people so... maybe it could help you too.”

“What is it you think I’m going through?” The mask she’s wearing grins, amused rather than threatened.

“Something that you’re drowning in,” It’s Steve, who has returned with coffee, pastries, and a desire to analyze her. His tone is mild, even, then he smiles like he’s at a funeral. “I know a bit about that, actually.”

Natasha, momentarily outflanked, takes desperate measures. “I didn’t sleep with Stark. And I’m never going to.”

The tactic is obvious, and as the woman who’s been running Stark’s eight-ring circus of a life for him for years, Pepper calmly finishes her sip with a dainty swallow. Steve chokes gracelessly and loudly on his croissant. “I already know that,” Pepper says.

“Good.”

“You thought that’s why I was upset about Natalie Rushman?”

“Mostly. Yes.”

“Well, the reason I was actually upset is that I thought we were friends but you didn’t think of me that way at all.” 

Natasha hides her wince, but the urge is there. “Hm.”

Pepper smiles at her. “But you’ve saved Tony’s life three times and all the testosterone is becoming stifling, no offense Steve, so I want to try to get to know you. Most of the time I can appreciate that you were just doing your horrifying job and taking care of scary things that I don’t want to know about.”

“And the rest of the time?”

Her smile remains sweet, it’s the that go feral. “I want to surgically attach a cat bell or throw you out a 97th story window.”

“You wouldn’t enjoy that.”

“Which one?"

She smiles a little. “Neither.”

Pepper sighs and changes the subject, realizing in the same moment as Natasha that by discussing events that occurred while he was freezer food and casually exchanging threats they’ve shut Steve out. “So, those giant bedbugs last week were really something, huh?”

Steve actually has a funny story involving bed bugs, WWII and swapped sleeping bags. They manage to chuckle. Pepper makes polite inquiries about what his life used to be while somehow gracefully avoiding every emotional bog. 

Natasha sighs, relieved to be forgotten for a moment, missing the days that aberrant routines and thought patterns only became a conversation topic if they interfered in her ability to kill people. If SHIELD officials got involved every time an agent seemed a little troubled, they would never sleep. 

Steve is in the middle of telling them about the wonders of army rations when he physically jumps out of the chair. Both of the women stare. “Steve? Are you all right?” Pepper inquires. 

Then he remembers what he has in his pocket and blushes. “Yes, I’m...fine.”

Natasha’s phone begins vibrating too and she reaches for it, but he pulls out his first, answering with a concise greeting. His expression, as always, indicates his deep-rooted suspicion that whole cellular phone business is an elaborate prank, possibly created by Stark. Immediately, the phone produces a wincingly high tone and Steve slumps over. Pepper wastes a single moment staring, Natasha shoves two fingers in his neck, there’s a strong, fast, pulse...

For the second time today, she recognizes as his body shifts from limp to aggressive. He swings at her with his right hand, clutches the phone tightly in his left. She ducks and knees him in the groin and slams her elbow into his kidney. He huffs quietly but does not go down and swats her into a bunch of chairs that fall with a clang.

In the moment it takes Natasha to rise, he leaps spectacularly at Pepper. She screams in response, but also ducks and he misses, colliding into the table of two chubby teenage boys on a date. Steve grabs one of them the same way he would a Kleenex then flexes his arm, testing the screaming weight on the end of it..

Natasha is performing arithmetic that she once would have called weakness. How many civilians is he going to kill? A bizarre moment of sentimentality (those are becoming an almost daily occurrence) washes over her and she decides that, since any other answer would destroy him where the whole of modern life has failed, the answer is zero. 

To that end, she throws coffee mugs, plates, silverware, and then, when he turns slowly to discover the source of these annoyances, herself at him. She slams an elbow into his solar plexus and an electrified fist into his neck. He tries to grab her, swinging his arm wide and leaving his stomach unguarded (whoever is in charge right now is terrible at hand to hand). She ducks, yanks a knife out of her boot and buries it up to the hilt into his unprotected armpit. Pepper, bless her, is herding civilians out with a tone of voice the average KGB agent would probably obey and calling Stark’s emergency line.

He actually pauses and his face teeters on the edge of an expression as he presses his hand against the arterial gush of blood. Natasha swings around him in an elegant tumble and yanks the gun out of the small of her back. 

She presses her gun into the base of his neck and the course of action is to pump his brainstem full of bullets. He will kill her and then dozens of other people and death is the ultimate preventative, the only guaranteed way to make him and his modified body stand down. Honestly, it’s what Rogers would want if she’d thought to ask him. Her hand seizes on the trigger. The moment passes and he’s moving again. She hesitated. Natasha knew this novel indecision would kill her, and it appears that that prediction is coming true. Right now--his hand is wrapped around her neck. Sloppy, she chastises herself, but since regret is a luxury limited to living slams the ball of her foot into his eye sockets at the same time. 

He doesn’t throw her, but instead simply hoists her off the ground, choking her with her own mass; his other fist crashes into her abdomen once, twice, three times, a deluge of blood pours down his side . It’s agonizing and she throws up on the arm holding her, the one she’s currently biting to no avail. The pain and the vomit are both indicative of something unsavory happening to her internal organs, but worrying about that isn’t going to make it stop. 

She shoots his thigh, calf, and torso and he responds by using both hands to strangle her in earnest. This presses the cell phone into her neck; he’s still holding it. Her vision greys. She grabs his wrists through blinding pain and incredible pressure and uses her cuffs to electrocute him, the current coursing through her body as well from every point of contact. Her pain triples, but she doesn’t let up. She shoves her foot firmly into his stab wound and with a surprisingly small crack and puff of smoke, his cell phone shatters, embedding bits of sharp plastic into her neck and his hand.

Steve drops her and surveys the damage on the adjacent infrastructure and his own body with a glazed expression, smelling his arm and frowning. He turns to her and starts to say her name in an unsteady way but Natasha has already seized one of the few remaining spindly metal chairs. She slams the rim, the heaviest and thickest section, against his head repeatedly until he slides to the ground because this is a lesson she learned in the hardest possible way. Every blow makes a sound she’d rather be deaf to while Pepper watches with enormous dewy eyes. 

Stark sets down moments later, matter-of-factly hobbles and cuffs Steve by welding bits of the metal chair Natasha is still clutching. He doesn’t ask where the circular dent or sticky texture came from. He also actually hugs his girlfriend instead of saying something stupid, the approximate equivalent of a marriage proposal from anyone else. 

Steve has already come to and is spouting apologies by the time they arrive. Fury growls about how this incident combines many of the Things He Likes Least (Goddamn mind control, bleeding Avengers, mountains of bribes and paperwork to conceal it, and Tony Stark on his helicarrier). It was inevitable, probably, that after an endless series of assaults on their bodies ended in resounding and embarrassing defeat the criminal element would, as a whole, realize that their minds were no different than anyone else’s except perhaps more unstable. They’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that.

Natasha is whisked away to undergo extensive tests to see if, between her own weapon, oxygen deprivation, and just what Steve can do to a merely human body, she damaged something important permanently. She allows it in order to evade Steve’s basset hound eyes. Pepper appears in her waiting room and Nat doesn’t ask where Clint is, though it requires an act of willpower.

“You should talk to someone.” Pepper is shaky and there are vertical lines of dilute mascara down her cheeks. She dealt with the crisis, but cried after. There is probably something to be said for doing both of those things, but in that order.

“To you?” Natasha sighs and shifts, hand fluttering to her black and blue neck. 

“No, I mean to a friend Just someone. I get the sense you’re not used to having someone to talk to. You keep trying to go on like this, you’ll break, and neither of us want to know that that might look like.” It’s the kind of thing that only a near-stranger could possibly get away with saying.

“That’s something that happens to other people.”

Pepper greets that statement with a watery smile. “Everyone needs that sometimes. I’m pretty sure that even includes you.” Something in her tone changes.

A realization strikes her. Pepper has lunch and coffee with clients, sycophantic subordinates, other executives; they discuss business and sales and insurance plans. She does not have drinks with girlfriends and win the Worst Boyfriend story contest every time or go to see movies with her older brother. She loves Tony more than reason would suggest possible, but she has no other obvious confidante or rock to cling to. She speaks from experience and at least half the reason she’s reaching out right now is out of a selfish desire for someone who cares to listen. 

Something shifts inside of her at the idea that she is being sought as a companion on equal footing rather than an object of pity. “Okay,” says Natasha finally. “Okay.”

Pepper nods slowly but allows both of them to save face, carefully dabs at her face with a handkerchief. “I’ve left Tony alone for almost half an hour now, so hopefully the damage is only in the ten thousands.”

“Realistically, I’d say add a few zeros.”

“Did I miss a spot?” 

Natasha seizes the handkerchief and wipes away the black that Pepper missed. “You look fine now.”

Pepper nods and then sits up a little straighter, returning to competence and grace in seconds. She waves goodbye with a smile that could, in dim light, be genuine. 

Natasha is fine in a musculoskeletal sense. Her limbs do as ordered and her organs are in the correct configuration. Everything hurts, but she doesn’t say that and she sits, waiting on the results from the standard blood work-up. She is fifteen minutes into a medical catalogue and about two from just breaking out of the hospital room, distant possibility of typhoid be damned, when the door to her room opened again. 

“Trying for the complete set, Nat? Gonna go a round with Thor next? That would only leave wiping the floor with Stark, which is something you should probably save for a rainy day.”

She recognizes the footsteps and only bothers looking up to measure his expression. “How long did it take you to come up with tha--what happened to you?”

The side of his face and upper arm look like someone used it as a meat block. “Speaking of going a round with Thor...He answered the phone. Banner handled it.”

For a moment, she feels like something massive has settled on her floating ribs and they are bending. “Banner and Thor? Are they-”

“Absolutely fine. Thor doesn’t even have a bruise, that bastard."

“I leave for two hours and you let Thor throw you into a wall?

“To be fair, he actually threw the wall at me.” Clint perches on the edge of her bed like a retriever on a pile of clean linens; at the sign of her slightest displeasure he will make some excuse, wish her well, and shift away. He doesn’t say that he’s pathetically happy that she’s talking to him today because they just don’t say things like that, but his face, full of relief and completely lacking in anger, conveys that sentiment. Clint has, as always, been waiting for her to come and talk of her own accord, knowing that that’s the only way the words will matter. If everything reversed, she would do the same for him, obviously, of course, always, but those would be bleak weeks. 

He continues. “Not that I didn’t miss you.”

Something goes soft at the uncomfortable amount of truth in that, so he continues speaking.. Even all these years later, neither of them knows what to do with a Moment except ruin it. “I hear you stabbed Captain America. Stalin would be proud.” 

“Does it hurt you to talk?”

Clint considers this for a moment, grinning when he realizes that it’s more a threat than actual expression of concern. “Not yet.”

She doesn’t ask him to stay but she doesn’t tell him to go, either and he will die of old age or more likely a single careless moment before getting a clearer invitation than that. He flops back on her examination table and is breathing slowly within minutes. 

His eyes flicker back open when the lab-tech returns with her fascinating but not troubling blood composition. Natasha’s expression accurately indicates her level of interest in conversation, so the tech lays down the piece of paper full of 7-syllable words and walks out. She nudges Barton on his bad side. He siezes her wrist and she holds very still without fear. “Come on. We’re not sleeping in here.”

She walks him to her room both of them forcing their legs to walk like it doesn’t hurt to move, a shared habit of decades. He’s asleep again in thirty seconds. 

Natasha ponders the moment here she seriously considered slaying a legend with opposing embarrassment and frustration, then wonders what it means that she knows herself better when she sits next to her unconscious partner. Her freedom now would require a massacre she lacks the stomach, but not ability, to commit. Natasha leans forward into her own hands and groans, softly so not to wake him, and then limps away to her own bed. She opens her phone and scrolls time to Pepper's number. She doesn't call it but doesn't delete it, either, a possibility or hope left for a different woman.


	6. The Time She Doesn't (Also Known as the Time No One Gets Hurt)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! It took me a very long time to write an ending to this I felt good about. Please feel free to make my day and leave any kind of feedback. It brightens my life.  
> In other news, can someone tell me how to list this as completed? Because this is most certainly the last chapter.

 

She doesn't need to reference any document, open any terminal, count any scars. She knows, as of this moment, as of the slender and delirious captive she'd tackled to the ground before he could get himself shot, Natasha is directly responsible for as many lives as deaths.

Perhaps this is when she finds herself a picket fence and a Beagle, if she were someone else. Because she's her, it's when she's dragged into a closet by her hair by someone who could bench press Rhode Island. She stabs him in the kidney as he locks her in, so that one can probably be fairly called a draw.

“Widow, report.” Steve's tone is on the desperate side of calm.

“I'm okay, I'm okay.”

“Just for the sake of argument, does 'okay' include, for instance, internal hemorrhaging? Perhaps a visible femur or two?”

“Stark. I'm fine.”

“That's really interesting, because the last time your heart rate was this fast someone was strangling you. Or was it the first time you saw me naked?”

Fury had said “We need you all on this,” and last time he said that the world ended (They unended it, of course, but that was a job and a half).

“Someone go get her.” Steve finishes that sentence over Natasha's irate hiss, knows that he's done the right thing by Clint's silence. “Banner?”

A sound that was pretty definitely something organic becoming concave. “Busy.”

“It would be an honor and privilege.”

“Right. Thor incoming, hang tight.”

“I am-”

“Our connection is breaking up.” And Steve, who blushed for five straight hours the first time it was nudity or hypothermia, Steve who spent Saturdays in the pediatric ward and still pulled out her chair every night and morning, made fake crackling noises and hung up.

Stark, of course, interrupted that pause. “Isn't it heartwarming, how quickly they grow up?”

 

This time, she keeps it together until she's back on the plane. She gropes around for a bag of any sort and her teammates react predictably (they help look out of both fondness and enlightened self-interest, except for Tony who just says “not on my shoes” like a mantra). Thor finally empties his box of snacks that are barely food and she accepts the paperboard then retches into it repeatedly.

“So, closets,” Steve makes a sound that probably isn't speech in any language, but ploughs ahead regardless. These days he's comfortable with the idea that even if he's overstepping boundaries, it is widely understood that he does so with pure intentions.

Natasha eyes him like she's mentally calculating the circumference of his jugular.

“Bad day in one?” The empathy and concern pouring forth from him is so sincere that it provokes Tony to mute gagging motions.

She waits to feel irritates, violated. Instead she chuckles, the sound of someone that has mostly learned to have her demons over for dinner without letting them move in. “Rough couple of weeks, actually.”

Thor offers her a tiny preservative-laden blueberry muffin in a baggie. She shakes her head and he shoves it into his already stuffed mouth. And with a nod that conversation ends. Sometimes being on an all-male team was wonderful.

She waits patiently from the instinctive expectation of a favor in return, the noose in the kindness. They'd come for her, no thought to how useful she'd be in the future. Their only motives were a desire for her well-being and because a world without her in it would be grey days and crying in ballrooms, a series of concepts her 12-year-old self would have curled a lip and then hurled a knife at.

Cling takes the soiled box and wraps it up like a burrito in an emergency blanket before it starts leaking because sometimes helping your friends sucks. He gently bumpd her shoulder, not smiling. “Okay?”

“Obviously.” She says and then inhales and tries again. He waits with a complete lack of motion, a hard-earned talent . “Good, actually."

A ledger that was neither black nor red but blank, all crisp paper and sandy edges. Human lives aren't algebra, but this still counts in an unexplainable way other things hadn't. She'll talk with Clint later and he'll tell her that he isn't great with numbers, but saving the world on a biannual basis probably meant she was covered. She wouldn't say that she felt warm with the possibilities unwriting was giving her because she doesn't watch the Lifetime channel, but he'd understand anyway and probably sling an arm around her shoulders. Maybe he'd get her drink for her, despite the fact she has both hands and knees and is entirely capable of getting one herself.

“I don't owe you anything anymore.” She informs Clint.

He cocks his head at her, keeps sanding the arrow. “I've been telling you that for years, Nat.”

“I know.” She smiles at him and something in the expression reflects into his and now he's staring in that earnest way she would have thought had been beaten, stabbed and burned out of him.

“But you just now started believing it.”

That doesn't require a response and as such doesn't get one.

She leans her head against his shoulder and he arranges her so her skull presses into his collarbone instead. Barton presses a kiss against the precious unshattered curve of her head.

With the arm she isn't laying on he roots around in his knapsack (“If it was a purse it would hold fewer knives, Stark”) and clasps something crinkly. He unwraps and offers Natasha the red and white mint and she pops it in her mouth with neither comment nor motion.

Tony can bear all things but silence. “I would offer to buy you two a room but oh wait, I seem to remember having done something very similar.”

“And our gratitude has not faded!” Thor cheerfully tells him and constricts him against his comically muscular chest in what an anaconda would consider a hug. Natasha smiles up at him and Thor winks back.

 

Clint grins up at her. “I used to worry about you.”

She picks through her jewelry box carefully, holding up a pair of turquoise jaguars against the pale skin of her throat and putting them back just as quickly. “That I would slit your throat while you slept? That's legitimate.”

“No, more that you would spend the rest of your life standing watch.”

“You're saying you don't anymore.”

Barton shakes his head and takes the liberty of a thoughtful pause. “Mostly I'm saying it's good that we're not the only ones we know anymore.”

“Sap.”

He mimes a man who has just been shot in the chest with disturbing accuracy, hams it up by slumping against her wall and sliding down. He eyes her up and down like he's only just noticed; a tic developed specifically for blending in that is now habit. “What are you getting so dressed up for?”

“It's our sixth anniversary.” She doesn't exactly answer the question.

“I know. They put fresh flowers on the memorials.” Barton sighs and strokes the knife concealed at his hip, glances sideways out the window at the still-scarred New York.

“It never occurred to me that we would live this long,” She hums in approval as she finds what she's looking for, simple yet iridescent triangles of emerald. She hooks one into each lobe and finds again that she is not the kind of woman that needs to ask Clint how she looks.

Clint cocks his head at that, trying to see the blurry shape of the meaning behind the words. “You seriously thought that only one of us might?”

She smiles up at him and huffs a soft laugh. “No, not that either.” The only thing that would be left for her after that would be the suicidal vengeance tour. It's the same for him. She's sure of that now.

“Anniversary dinner. But it's still Wednesday, so you're making it.”

Clint nods at that unremarkable sentence. “What do you want?”

She addresses only the most immediate meaning behind that question. “Surprise me.”

He manages a close approximation of schwarma. They trade old stories that have become more like lies. Bruce spits out his drink on Steve during Tony's highly dramatized rendition of the lice awareness campaign they'd had to speak for as one of Fury's less subtle punishments for skipping an ethics review. Barton expertly throws tiny wet squares of paper towel into Bruce's ears, who obviously knows who's doing it but does not once catch him. They all insist that they don't remember the now powdered church building Steve is talking about so that he has to draw it: He pulls out a pen and makes a silhouette with easy, casual strokes against the napkin. They watch in rapt silence as one of them finally makes something instead of crushing it.

Thor stalks away with wounded eyes when Tony toasts to six years as a team and the “crazy cheek boned jackass” who'd brought them all together. Natasha follows him, croons in what sounds like German until his basketball arms finally relax. She slides a single hand over the curve of his shoulder in a soothing motion. Clint wonders yet again why he even considers that she might ever choose him.

 

Late that night, Natasha explains to him about today, about important things and small ones. He passes her the pungent vodka bottle, a gift he'd gotten her last year on impulse on a day he hadn't realized was February 14.

He begins in a conversational tone. “So, you finally managed to throw up on something that isn't sentient-”

She tackles him before he can finish that sentence, not her professional economic yet lethal motions but something playful. He chuckles and tries to both get her in a headlock and not enjoy their proximity too much, two equally impossible tasks.

They both savor the sensation of ceasing, of not fighting past every limit in the body and the mind out of a desire to live and simple force of habit. They stop together, even though neither of them is out of breath. She's propped against his shoulder again, facing him. Nat sits up a little taller and grabs the vodka bottle with one hand, balances against his shoulder with the other. She takes a deep swig and looks down at his face, dissects his expression but doesn't avert her gaze when she's done.

Her hand moves from his shoulder and Clint's sure she's going to wipe a smudge of dirt or maybe the gentle smile off his face. Instead, she drags her fingertips across his neck and he flinches, though not for the reasons most people would. When he stills, she lets her hand drop down against her own thigh, a rare and wholly unwelcome nervousness coursing through her. He gulps audibly and she leans back, shies away but like a cat, like this almost tangible uncertainty battling her warm sense of allayed responsibility was exactly what she'd intended all along, like she's always wanted to have this conversation while she was straddling him.

She doesn't leave things half done so she kisses him. It's something between an impulse and not; an action she's long considered and premeditates, but only in these past moments. When they pause and her lipstick is smeared across his neck and mouth; she sits up again, but only moves far away enough to look at him.

She yawns and stretches her arms far above her; tries to find a reason to put this off and can't. “Clint.” She waits until he's making eye contact. “If I asked you to stay with me tonight, what would you say?”

He stares at her like reality has so casually segued into something he made himself stop hoping for ages ago. He's imagined then coming together far too often, in desperation, in the clinging guilt of the lone survivor, a tongue kiss from a hospital bed, after a funeral or before one. Never doing shots, a casual smile on her face, the strong taste of unflavored vodka on her tongue.“Yeah,” He murmurs and then with more articulation and confidence. “I would definitely say yes.”

She smiles a little at that and the expression is sweet instead of poisonous. “Then I'm asking.”

“Why?”

“I don't owe you anything,” She repeats, “I'm here-” and he knows that means both here as in New York in a leather catsuit on the regular and here, making a move on this ridiculously huge couch, “because I want to be.”

“Okay.” And those words hang a smile across his face, tugging at that little scar at the corner of his eye. In that moment she finally stops wondering whether this will be what ruins everything.

Nat winds her hand through his, strokes her knuckles with his thumb. She starts to move, intent on leading him but for a moment his bulk is dead weight behind her. She glances back at him and hesitates, a verb he never thought he'd apply. “You can still say no.”

“But we both know I won't.”

 

The next morning she brightens when his eyes fall open and it feels like another beginning.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted on ff.net.  
> The rest of the chapters feature most if not the entire team. Just this first one is only the two spies.  
> I've only been on this website for a few days, but am seriously intimidated. You all are awesome and consistently write really great stuff. I'm delighted to have found it.  
> Leave a comment with some constructive criticism, if you have a chance and want to make my day.


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